2009

University of Arizona Press

This book explores the variety of ways the New Deal affected Native American arts and crafts. According to McLerran, the driving forces behind the Native American arts revival during the New Deal were John Collier, social worker and Indian commissioner, and Rene D’Harnoncourt, art expert enamored of the Mexican Mestizo movement and seeker of a comparable incorporation of Native American elements into the fabric of the general American cultural heritage.

Native craft skills in the United States, by the time of the New Deal, were inferior to what they had been before intensive white contact and alteration of traditional society. Influencing the revival in the United States was the revival of interest in Native folk arts in Mexico, a revival that included incorporation of native elements in the Mestizo art movement such as muralist Diego Rivera. The influence of the Mestizo artists extended into the United States, even before the Great Depression. And according to A New Deal for Native Art,it stimulated a revival of interest in Native American art.

By the 1930s Native American art was largely history. Traditional methods and tools and motifs had been corrupted or lost during the decades when acculturation meant Indian schools that frowned on Native usages of any sort. The bias against anything “Indian” was compounded by the rise of tourism; American tourists then as now preferred gimcrack novelties rather than more serious art, and Native Americans seeking a livelihood crafted for the market, not for the good old days.

Although D’Harnoncourt was influenced by the Mestizo movement and stimulated a similar effort in the United States, neither he nor Collier was particularly interested in contemporary Native American art, preferring their Native art to be traditional, in a sense a harkening back to better, more pure, days. Others were more willing to create something comparable to the art of the Mexican muralists. Both approaches were taken during the 1930s.

Some New Dealers built on the efforts of D’Harnencourt and museums and contractors who defined a standard for a higher art, trained Indian craft workers to the point of bringing artifacts and recreating traditional tools and pigments so the 1930s workers could work in the traditions of their different tribes. Some tribes even preferred the traditions of other tribes to their own. The high art consortium also sponsored fairs and exhibits at large expositions, in urban galleries, and elsewhere. Their goal was to enhance the market for high quality Indian art to reestablish an economic alternative to tourist novelties, to add the Native art to the American tradition, and to revitalize the Indian’s lost culture by linking the modern to the pre-occupation past.

D’Harnencourt, and particularly Collier with his background in social work, were less enamored of the high art approach but willing to use it as a means of bringing back the social viability of the Indians. The Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C. contained a great deal of contemporary artists’ renderings in traditional styles as well as murals, a form taken from Mexico but painted in traditional American style.

McLerran also discusses the return of totemic art, noting that it had to be wrenched out of context and, to an extent, corrupted in style and content in order to become a tourist attraction instead of a family’s possession. She seems a bit peeved that the totems that were taken to parks were copies or refurbished versions of original art that had deteriorated and was regarded by the New Dealers as not worthy of reclamation. But she also stresses that the totem pole program was beneficial to the Alaskan Natives in bringing income from tourism, reviving carving skills that could be used on tourist items as well, and revitalizing the community by bringing back practices that had been discouraged or banned under earlier federal policy. Similarly, but without the negative feeling, she discusses the rehabilitation of the southwestern ruins, Chaco Canyon and elsewhere. She doesn’t put this into the broader context of refurbishment of missions and presidios that occurred at the same time and also froze those institutions in a long-dead time. There is a distinction though – the contemporary inhabitants near to the long-abandoned missions and presidios were not expected to remain as they were in the Spanish colonial era.

The book is lavishly illustrated, unfortunately in black and white rather than color. McLerran’s experience as museum curator shows in the way much of the text reads like an exhibition catalog, describing the placement of figures in a painting, discussing the flat style and lack of perspective, guiding the reader to a better viewing of a work of art. Many of the illustrations she uses are of formal art; examples of the tourist style frowned on by the New Dealers are scarce.

More important, A New Deal for Native Artis a good study of how well-meaning outsiders trample all over people for the people’s “benefit.” From Progressives to New Dealers with a lot of folk art revivalists in the middle, mostly-white-middle-class reformers decided to reestablish Native American art and crafts. The motives varied – some sought profit, others wanted high art, and still others wanted to resolve a social problem by restoring elements of a more successful time, the pristine past before the Indians became degraded due to the European influence – but all agreed that what the Indians wanted was irrelevant, even if the Indians wanted to be modern Americans. For some, particularly in that case. The helpful folks of the Indian arts revitalization effort agreed in a sense that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, an Indian of a mythic past. Live Indians didn’t meet their standard except as they modeled after the Indians who met the English boats.

McLerran is professor of art history and museum curator. The two perspectives combine into a strong history of Native American art in the New Deal. The scholarship is impeccable, the argument compelling, and the work is a valuable addition to the study of both the new deal and twentieth century Indians. If only the illustrations were in color.

Reviewed by John Barnhill, Independent Scholar

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